Prof. Dr. Dr. Bernd U. Schipper, Professor of the History of Israel in the Ancient Near Eastern World, and his research team have received funding of 2.5 million euros from the European Research Council (ERC) for their DEMBIB project as part of the Advanced Grants programme.
For the first time, findings on the origins and literary form of demotic literature will be linked to theories on the literary history of the Old Testament.
The TAMEHODGE project by Prof Dr Bruno Klingler from the Department of Mathematics reveals a surprising connection between Hodge theory and Tame Geometry. It is being funded by the ERC with a maximum of 1.8 million euros.
ERC Advanced Grants support excellent and self-initiated research projects by leading researchers. Applicants must be able to demonstrate significant research achievements in the last 10 years. The maximum funding amounts to 2.5 million euros for a period of 5 years with the possibility of an additional top-up of up to 1 million euros.
Egyptian papyri and the origin of the Hebrew Bible
The DEMBIB project (From Texts to Literature. Demotic Egyptian Papyri and the Formation of the Hebrew Bible) places the literary history of the Old Testament - the Hebrew Bible - in a new context. The discovery of numerous papyri in Egyptian demotic script over the last 20 years has produced a corpus of texts that originated in the immediate historical and geographical neighbourhood of the literature of ancient "Israel", but which has so far received little attention from Old Testament research.
Prof Schipper and his interdisciplinary research team, consisting of demoticists and Old Testament scholars, are linking findings on the origins and literary form of demotic literature with theories on Old Testament literary history for the first time. The comparative approach of the project is based on the observation that the Hebrew and Demotic texts were written under comparable socio-historical conditions: Egypt and ancient "Israel" were equally determined by foreign rule and international influences in the 5th-3rd centuries BC, which had a direct impact on the literary elites of the time.
The research project promises to provide new insights into the literary techniques of the ancient scribes, who developed their own written traditions into larger historical works, complex prophecies and skilfully composed books of wisdom. In this way, new answers can be found to questions that research into the history of Old Testament literature has recognised as particularly pressing, such as the better understanding of the redaction of the Old Testament books, the clarification of the relationship between literary models and later text versions, as well as the significance of scribal scholarship and (temple) schools.
Exploring the transcendence of periods through Tame Geometry
The TAMEHODGE project (Tame Geometry and Transcendence in Hodge Theory) aims to address fundamental questions of Hodge theory using tools of mathematical logic.
Hodge theory, developed in the 1970s, became the main tool for understanding the geometry and arithmetic of complex algebraic varieties, i.e. solution sets of algebraic equations over the complex numbers. It can be thought of as a dramatic linearisation that associates to each complex algebraic variety a very simple object: a finite dimensional complex vector space that encodes the periods of the differential forms on the variety. At the centre of the theory is the fundamental fact that - even though Hodge's theory generates very simple objects - it is not itself determined by a simple algebraic prescription, but requires transcendental operations. However, two important assumptions in mathematics, Hodge's conjecture and Grothendieck's period conjecture, state that this transcendence is strictly limited.
Recent work by Prof Klingler and his collaborators has shown the emergence of a spectacular connection between Hodge theory and tame geometry.tame geometry, whose possibility was proposed by Grothendieck in the 1980s and further developed by logicians under the name 'o-minimal geometry', investigates structures in which every definable set has finite geometric complexity. The project aims to show that 'moderate geometry' is the natural framework for this theory, with important applications to the transcendence of periods, atypical intersections and non-Abelian Hodge theory.
Further information
Press release from the ERC
ERC Advanced Grants
Contact
Prof. Dr Dr Bernd U. Schipper
Faculty of Theology
History of Israel in the Ancient Near Eastern World
Humboldt-Universit?t zu Berlin
Phone: +49 30 2093-5876
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Prof. Dr Bruno Klingler
Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences
Department of Mathematics
Humboldt-Universit?t zu Berlin
Phone: +49 30 2093-5824
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